Good morning/afternoon, Gents. I've been readin' up on your mechanical adventures, and reminiscing on some of my own. I have been wrenchin' and hammerin' on stuff since I was a tad, sort of seem to have come by it natcherly, somehow. It has to have been passed in my genes, but it skipped a generation, and must be selective; my Dad, and my Li'l Bro didn't/don't have it.
I never had much care for "Crashler" products, although I did own a couple, and used a lot of them at work; I gotta say that for the most part, they were tough; we beat the he&* out of the stuff at work, and it seldom failed us; it might limp a lot, but it usually kept going enough to get back to town. I had a '69 Dodge A100 short wheelbase van for a couple of years, and it was always presenting me with one puzzle or challenge, or another, and I took it as a real pain in the a&*. I sold it to qualify to buy our first house, and thought good riddance. Actually, though, the Mopar performance cars of the sixties and early seventies were exciting and imperssive machines. The parking lot where I was based looked like a local downtown car show of today, with a number of Mopars, GMs, and Fords of the Muscle Car persuasion; I had a '68 Chevelle SS396 that ran 12 second quarters at OCIR and Lyons and Irwindale; it was our first "family" car - we bought it when my Bride was too pregnant to climb into our 4x4, or squeeze into the hot rod, and we needed a real "car" for the expected youngster. So both of our boys came home from the hospital in a race car, and later, they learned to drive in modified 4x4s and performance oriented cars; even our first station wagon, a '70 Chevy Kingswood Estate, had an early "shelf built" 383 Mouse Motor in it in 1973. A neighbor had a '72 impala with a 400 in it that sucked a valve and boogered the block, but the crank was good, so I gave him a few bucks toward a new engine, and took the old crank off his hands; I picked up a nearly new '73 350 block from another buddy, and voila: a 383. It was a runner, too. Back then, 383 Chevys were not a real hot thing, yet; today, ervery Tom, Dick, and Harry seems to have one. Nowadays, I have a '59 Chevy pickup that is in the process of being "resto-rodded", and my "daily" is a '02 Toyota Tundra 4x4 that is looking for a new suspension system in the future - funds available, of course.
On two wheels, my fist ride was an Ariel 500 single that belonged to a Navy buddy - I called it a leg buster. He let me ride it most any time I wanted, and it was a pretty good starting platform. I picked up a '59 Triumph 500 Twin for my very own first ride - actually my only own bike; I had three wrecks on that thing - wild youth and immortality, ya' know - and decided maybe I ought not to do that anymore. I sold it broken after the last mishap, and only rode the occasional odd bike after that. Had a friend who was a mech for a Honda/Yamaha dealer, and I got to ride one of their bikes from time to time. But my Bride is dead set against me being on only two wheels, so I restrain myself just to keep the domestic tranquility intact. That must be why I always drive with my windows open and the wind in my face.
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